The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes. Sirens blast through the oily haze of muted violins. A tart touts for trade. There is no romance here: no first love, no new love, no true love. Just ordinary sadness and ordinary yearning: a marriage bruised beyond repair, a dead child kept alive in his father’s memory, and a futile and fatal affair.
The first revival of Richard Jones’s Il trittico sees a new conductor at the helm, Nicola Luisotti, and several key cast changes. On the opening night, the balance was problematic.
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